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Part of
Studies in Turkish as a Heritage Language
Edited by Fatih Bayram
[Studies in Bilingualism 60] 2020
► pp. 105–126

Chapter 6
First language exposure predicts attrition patterns in Turkish heritage speakers’ use of grammatical evidentiality

| | University of Groningen
| University of Groningen | Higher School of Economics University, Moscow

This chapter reports on a preliminary study examining the production of grammatical evidentiality forms in narrative speech samples elicited from heritage language speakers (HLS) of Turkish. Turkish grammatically marks direct and indirect sources of evidence one has for their statement. We explored (1) how Turkish HLS use evidentiality marking as compared to monolingual Turkish speakers, and (2) which factors predict their performances in producing evidentiality. Our findings showed that the HLS made a large number of contextually inappropriate substitutions by using direct evidentials in places where an indirect evidential would be used, and that this pattern is largely predicted by the amount of self-reported exposure to the first (heritage) language in daily life.

Keywords: evidentiality, narrative speech, heritage language speakers, Turkish-Dutch bilingualism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Some features of evidentiality in Turkish
  • 3.Relevant studies on Turkish heritage speakers
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Materials
    • 4.3Procedure
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1General characteristics of utterances and finite verbs
    • 5.2Inflected forms for evidentiality
    • 5.3Determining the predictors of incorrect uses of evidentiality through machine learning
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.60.06ars
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